19. The only liberal move is not to play 🔗

I’ve been wondering why there are no “own the illibs” memes. Then it hit me: the main way any sort of liberal (big tent sense, including progressive and classical) “owns” illiberalism is simply not participating in it. Not “getting with the program.” Going idle if necessary.

It’s like saying “I’ll take the next one” when you don’t want to get on an elevator with some bunch of people. It is insulting to the degree there is room in the elevator. The biggest “own the illibs” move is simply not getting on the illiberal train. No matter how much they win.

The simplest and most powerful “weapon of the weak” is non-participation. It does more than rob the illiberal movement of energy and labor. It undermines it. That’s why they are desperate to “own” you in a rhetorical judo sense because they can’t actually own an unconsenting mind

The thing is, illiberal movements tend to be totalizing. There’s a promised land, everybody can and must go there, it will last forever, no need to go anywhere else after. To say “I’ll take the next one” is to belie the posture that this is the only one and the last one.

Even ethnonationalism has a promised land all must go to. It’s called Back Home. Because the promised land is a planet where there’s a natural “ancestral” place for everyone and everybody is in their place. At least genocide isn’t plan A, so it’s marginally better than fascism.

To the ones on elevator, it’s a threat because to them it’s not just one in an unending up-down circuit. It’s more like last boarding call on last ark of survival. To refuse to get on is to say “I don’t think there will be a flood”. Makes it hard/impossible for them to pretend

Non-participation is so powerful it even works on other weapons of the weak, like strikes, boycotts, rioting. You may need to be stealthy about it, even lie, but it’s the most basic move. The zero of the political action number line. Labor can be forced, belief cannot.

But non-participation can only be used as a weapon to undermine totalizing ideologies, against which it is all-powerful. But there is a class of ideologies against which it is entirely ineffective: pluralistic ideologies.

A pluralist ideology is the opposite of totalitarian. If your ideology doesn’t require 100% local monopoly and can live with competitors so long as it has space and social energy for itself, non-participation is neither an insult nor a threat. It’s not an imperative to “own” you.

Communism failed precisely because capitalism is best defined primarily as non-participation in communism. It’s the scabspace. The ultimate scabs are not workers who break a picketting action, but consumers who don’t stop consuming out of solidarity with particular producers.

The punchiest “own the libs” illiberal meme, NPC, almost tags their actual biggest threat: true non-players of the illiberal game. Not the ones who indulge in futile resistance posturing but the ones who simply don’t opt-in to the illiberalism du jour. “I’ll take the next one.”

Non-participation is a tactic, not an ideology. Its meanings are context-dependent. When they want you to do X, you avoid it, make excuses, fake it, sandbag, drag feet, take a knee, reject job offers from presidents. When they want you to stop doing X, you continue stealthily.

Note: a lot of non-participation tactics are identified with labor movement, but that’s coordinated, collective non-participation.

The underlying tactic is available to all individuals at all times, so is pre-ideological. Like Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to,” but with a plan B.

Totalizing, illiberal ideologies feed on growth and expansionary takeover of minds. They burn it all up and then they burn out. Because unlike pluralist ideologies (which are liberal by construction) they have no sustainable internal energy source.

They have to operate like MLM/ponzi schemes. Without new recruits there is only natural attrition and flame out. Then the next elevator comes along. And the next. And you can say, “I’ll take the next one” each time. Because here’s the thing: you don’t have to take one at all

I once read a quote (in Keller Easterling’s book Extrastatecraft, but can’t recall attribution) that “liberalism is not the sort of thing that has an essence.” Kinda. The essence of liberalism is non-participation optionality. Saying no. Waiting. To “take the next one” or stairs.

Because pluralism (and all liberalism is pluralist) is fundamentally the belief that ideology is not in fact necessary for life. Life can go on, and sustainable energy for the psyche found, without going into the fold of a True Believer sheeple. Life without ideology is possible.

As a result pluralist ideologies exclusively rely on opt-in temptations and reject the totalizing impulse. If they can’t get to self-sustaining critical mass, they adapt and evolve rather than turn to coercion. Minimum viable size for a pluralist ideology might be just 1 person.

Hell it can be less than 1 person. I’m capitalist on MWF, socialist on TuThu, traditionalist on Saturday, and ungoverned anarchist on Sunday. If I were more imaginative I’d have DIY substitutes for all 4. And they’d be all sub-singleton.

Note that mere multiplicity of belief options and co-existence is not enough. It is necessary but not sufficient. What makes it pluralist and liberal is the opt-in factor, with no punitive consequences for opt-out. So intersectionality is neither liberal, nor pluralist.

It is in fact isomorphic to right ethnonationalism. A place for everyone and everyone in their place. It’s just that promised land is not the static ancestral political geography of earth but a Standard Database Schema maintained by First Bureaucrats instead of First Ancestors.

This is why illiberal criticisms of free markets from both left and right sound silly in the same way. They look for a totalizing coordination nerve center like their own to attack but cant find one. Tilting at “bankers” or “1%” is ultimately as futile as 9/11 was for Al Qaeda.

Free markets are primarily free in a pluralist competition sense. All distortions coming from illiberalisms. And not only is totalizing presence NOT a goal for any one player, it is both ideologically rejected as bad (monopoly) and constraints generally accepted, even welcomed.

Sure pluralism of any form, in a market form or some other structural form, has a critical flaw: tragedy of the commons. But here’s the thing: no totalizing ideology to date has been a better steward of any commons. They just sacralize it in words while defiling it in the dark.

So: the most liberal thing you can do, for as long as it takes, is to simply find a way to keep existing and say “I’ll take the next one” no matter what the provocation, goading, mocking, or seduction. That’s the only own-the-illibs move you need. They’re on a clock. You’re not.